Comic books often tell stories about the most powerful people on Earth, so they’ve always had a curious relationship with the actual most powerful person on Earth: the United States president.
Scott McCloud’s tongue-in-cheek The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln pits the mythologized image of Lincoln against the great but flawed reality. A grinning faux-populist Lincoln (above) tries to take control of the country through straight-up brainwashing, and a more historically accurate Lincoln (below) labors to stop him.
The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln was underrated when it came out, and like too many older stories about exposing political crookery, it can read as naïve today. But it’s a serious attempt to interrogate the way we mythologize the best-known older presidents, and in that respect, it’s the exception that proves the rule. Most comic books have leaned into such myth, whether published in the 1930s, the 1960s, or modern times…
To be clear here, we’re speaking only of comic books—political cartoons have their own traditions of rendering presidents, and that history is much better documented.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first president to appear in contemporary comic books, if only because the medium as most people know it didn’t begin until his administration. His appearances while he was alive were usually brief, but they reflected his popularity, like this bit from All-American Comics #9.
Some aspects of this story feel all too contemporary: a man embittered by his inability to find work gets radicalized by Nazi propaganda and won’t see the light until the story’s over.
Roosevelt took a more active role in stories published after his death, especially those written by Roy Thomas. In Thomas stories, Roosevelt founded two different super-teams, the exclusive Justice Society and the larger All-Star Squadron. In the original JSA stories, that group just kind of formed itself, but in Thomas’ retelling, it was the president’s vision that brought both groups together (All-Star Squadron #1).
The idea of a president forming an extralegal force “responsible to no one but himself” hits a little different in 2025, but these stories were published in the 1980s—the era of the first three Indiana Jones movies, when nostalgia was at its peak for World War II stories where Americans were unambiguous good guys.
Nowhere was this spirit clearer than Secret Origins #31, which retold the story of the Justice Society’s formation. In it, a band of super-heroes joins together to save FDR’s life—but despite their best efforts, they arrive too late. Roosevelt is dead in 1940—and unlike many Americans at the time, the JSA are sure that America joining the war is inevitable. Who’s going to lead America when that happens, John Nance Garner?
This is unacceptable, intolerable. And it forces the ghostly Spectre to intervene—even if that intervention means making war on God Himself. The resulting sequence may be over-the-top presidential flattery, but its emotional power is undeniable, too.
Thomas wasn’t always quite so jingoistic as this—other stories he wrote acknowledged the Japanese internment camps—but he never connected those with FDR. In his telling, even FDR’s few missteps were defensible and almost immediately regretted (Invaders v1 #5).
Kennedy’s most famous appearance in comics was also complimentary in its way, but a lot wackier. The 1960s version of Superman was used to using robot stand-ins whenever he and “Clark Kent” needed to appear in the same place. But he loses that option when Lois and Lana get their hands on a robot detector and decide to prove he’s fooling them once and for all. Using Batman isn’t an option either, so what’s a Superman to do (Action Comics #309)?
Good think Kennedy didn’t have anything important to do just then, right?
Actually, Kennedy didn’t have anything important to do at the time this story was published: he’d already been dead for a month (oops). Another Superman-JFK story was held back, then published in tribute a year later (Superman #170)—promoting Kennedy’s interest in the nation’s physical fitness.
Superheroes are embodiments of law and order, and so’s the president, right? If Superman can’t trust the President of the United States, who can he trust? This wholly uncritical view persisted in American comics—as it did in much of America and even its allies—until the 1970s arrived to complicate the picture. More on that next time.